DevLog

I just wanted to post quickly to say that I am still alive and Waves is still being worked on despite the lack of activity from myself either here or on Twitter.

This is due to my being out of the country right now helping my girlfriend move house as well as looking after a sick cat. Unfortunately moving house also means painting and doing lots of DIY which is eating my days.

The good news is that the game is feature complete and now just needs the remaining content to be completed before I start a big fat private beta and start balancing. If things go well the game should still be on track for release in the autumn.

There will be a demo of the game available.

For lack of a screenshot here is a picture of our cat Noortje who is 16 years old and is very poorly right now.

In this mode you have no weapons and the only way to kill anything is by picking up explosives from the Red Gate and delivering them to the Nuke Gate.

It’s not simple though. The explosives are on a ten second timer and if you don’t get them into the gate on time then they’re going to explode taking you with them.

You can gain an advantage though – get a X10 Combo and you’ll receive a shield which will knock nearby enemies away if you get hit. If you want you can even trigger it early with the bomb button. It comes in very hand if you need to dive headfirst into the mass of enemies to get to the gate.

This is probably the hardest mode so far in Waves. If you notice the scores at the end of the video this was the first run I scored over 1 million in. It is incredibly harsh and made me focus very closely on the collision detection code and I spent hours tuning the players movement speed and acceleration as a result.

Even though this is the hardest mode in the game to get really high scores at I’ve found myself to be completely addicted to it. I’ve lost hours when I was testing something because I compulsively hit the “Play Again” button at the end of each round. I’m hoping this is a good sign.

There are some other graphical changes in this version – most obviously the trails behind enemies and the new explosions. All of these are in the other modes and the game is even running faster now than it was when I made the Time Attack video.

Things are moving along very quickly and should be ready for a release in the autumn.

I’ve been working on The Cube (remember him? He’d clump about the arena not really doing much but being kinda cool).

Well The Cube has gotten a little smaller and had a facelift. He’s also learnt a new trick – Stay still too long and he might just charge straight at you. All that tumbling around? That’s just so he can line you up for a smashing.

All ideas are not created equal. If you follow me on Twitter you will be privy to the more detailed aspects of Waves development and will have seen lots of screenshots of stuff that is in development and in some cases been cut from the game.

I thought I’d share some of them with everybody else along with why they might have ended up on the cutting room floor. This is a bit like the Deleted Scenes part of a DVD.

If you want up to the minute updates on what I’m working on then you should really follow me on Twitter.

Women will be acutely aware of this phenomena but men do not follow instructions. I’d argue that this is because the male mind is hard wired to problem solve, we get a big kick out it. This means that when faced with a new toy the last thing we will ever do is read a manual.

It would be disingenuous of me to say that “Gamers” also do not follow instruction. For example there are a great deal of female gamers who in my experience will pour over the manual for a game before they even install it. Gamers are also very good at following tutorials because they are a form of interactive feedback loop.

The “How to Play” screen is the Indie games equivalent of a manual. They are incredibly important but they never get read by the majority of players.

It’s important to know what “Done” looks like. It’s a phrase one of my friends uses when talking about programming.

So far the development of Waves has been in what I would consider a pre-production phase. I know that alot of people think it looks finished because it’s graphically very polished but the reality is that while I could release what I have now to the world I wouldn’t be proud of the result. It’s not done yet.

I’ve actually spent the last few weeks figuring out what “Done” looks like and I now have a list of everything I need to do to ensure that I can hit it.

It’s a big list and as I work through the tasks it will only get bigger. That’s just how lists work.

This at last means that I am confident about what will actually be in Waves when it gets released for the first time since I started. If I had sat down at the start and designed an Arena Shooter then what I designed would not be what Waves has become and this would be bad. It would be far more generic and much less interesting. I’d be ticking off genre tropes on a list rather than finding out what works and why some things are fun and others aren’t.

Waves won’t be coming out this year. I’m confident of this. With only about 6 weeks left in the year to realistically get anything done it means that the first beta version won’t happen until sometime in January next year at the earliest.

Sadly the part that is going to take the longest time is as always going to be the GUI. I hate doing the GUI so if you happen to be an amazing (and cheap!) Flash designer then you might be able to help with that. Feel free to get in touch if that’s the case.

Hello! I must apologise for being late but there was a cat outside and I got distracted.

It’s been a while since we’ve done this hasn’t it? It feels like only yesterday but somehow it’s been over four months. Amazing.

While I like to think that you come to these events for the amazing conversation and my winning personality I suspect you’re really only here for the latest Videogram of Waves. Well if that’s the case I may as well get it out of the way early.